The present invention generally relates to television schedule information, and more particularly to a system and method for providing previews of scheduled programming to assist a viewer in making scheduling decisions.
As the number of television stations in a metropolitan area or on a cable network has increased, the number of programs of potential interest that are presented to a viewer has risen dramatically. With the use of dish antennas capable of receiving direct satellite signals, the multitude of programs available to the viewer has further increased.
Additionally, television faces a digital future that will see the merger of television and PC technology. The television set of the future will include a micro-computer, a modem of interconnectivity with other computers over networks, intranets, and the internet, and be connectable to computer peripherals such as printers. Such capabilities as near xe2x80x9cvideo on demandxe2x80x9d (NVOD), xe2x80x9cvideo on demandxe2x80x9d, access to the world wide webxe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9caudio on demandxe2x80x9d, etc. will present the viewer with a plethora of information and bandwidth.
As has become increasingly evident, information overload can actually reduce the usefulness of the information delivered. Accordingly, a great challenge exists to provide an interface that manages and provides an intelligent, user-friendly interface to the information available.
Consequently, television schedule systems that are provided directly on the viewer""s television screen have been developed to assist the viewer in sorting through these various programs and determining which programs to watch or record. One such television schedule system is disclosed in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,353,121 (Young et al.), the complete disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference. In one embodiment of Young, the television schedule includes a series of menu screens having an array of cells corresponding to different television programs. The viewer may scroll through the cells to view which television programs are being presented on various channels at various times. In addition, the viewer may select certain cells to obtain more information on the associated program or to pull up other submenus with additional options.
The recent development of television schedule systems, such as the above described patent to Young, have created many new challenges. One such challenge is assisting viewers to select programs to view from the vast amount of programming available. As more programming is available the consumer needs more information to assist in selecting, especially in the case of pay-per-view where the consumer must intelligently budget entertainment costs.
The present invention is a method and system for providing video previews for particular programs selected from an electronic programming guide.
According to one aspect of the invention, a bit stream modulated on a carrier includes preview video packets. When a viewer selects a particular program from an on-screen guide a video stream, including the video packets or signals for the. particular program, is selected and utilized to generate a xe2x80x9cpreviewxe2x80x9d video signal. The preview video is then displayed on the screen.
According to another aspect of the invention, the preview video is displayed on only a portion of the screen to allow-the video to be transmitted using less bandwidth.
According to another aspect of the invention, a single video preview is transmitted in a digital data stream as a carousel or endless loop. There are individual bit streams for each preview.
According to another aspect of the invention, several video previews are transmitted in a single bit stream. The different previews are transmitted as a carousel or endless loop.